


Eye to Eye

by Arriva



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (of sorts), A LOT of Artistic Liberties, Artistic Liberties, Everything I know about degenerative eye diseases came from Google, Gen, Including some liberties I took with the timeline, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 17:46:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13172034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arriva/pseuds/Arriva
Summary: A long time ago, Miranda Pryce was born with cursed eyes. A brief look into the life and times of Miranda Pryce before she became Dr. Miranda Pryce.





	Eye to Eye

Miranda Alice Pryce was born on April 11, 1948. Her mother didn't survive childbirth. Her father skipped town the night her mother told him she was pregnant.

On the night of January 19, 1949, Miranda looked like she was going to the same place her mother went. The nuns at the orphanage found her howling with a high fever and a rash. The nuns did what they always did for sick babies. But after three days and no sign of improvement, Miranda was back in the hospital. Had the nuns brought her in sooner, the doctors would have caught the bacterial meningitis sooner. But they didn't. "Had they done something sooner," would become a recurring theme in Miranda's life.

Back to 1949. The doctors thought she would die. Most infants didn't survive meningitis, especially late cases like Miranda's. The death of an infant was nothing to rejoice about, but at least this infant didn't have parents, the doctors reasoned. A morbid thought, but the doctors had seen too many a time how the death of an infant affected parents.

Miraculously, little Miranda recovered. The day her fever broke, there were no parents to hold her. No one said, "Thank god she's all right." The nuns simply brought her back to orphanage.

No one noticed how Miranda's eyes had trouble focusing or the little cloudy flecks in them.

* * *

By the time she was five years old, Miranda Pryce wore coke-bottle glasses. They took up half her little face and if she wore them too long, they gave her headaches. But the alternative was seeing the world in a blur. 

By the end of kindergarten, Miranda knew all the names.  _Four Eyes_.  _Frog Face. Googly-Eyes._ The worst were nighttimes. When Miranda went to bed, sometimes the other kids at the orphanage would steal her glasses. In the morning, they'd laugh as Miranda bumped into walls and stumbled over beds crying at them to give her glasses back. Some days she just gave up.

When she could find her glasses again, Miranda would sneak away to the one place none of the kids could find her. The basement. That was where the orphanage ran all its electrical operations. There Miranda could play.

Miranda played with gears and wires and things that no five-year old should be touching, but who would notice? Her favorite things to make were dolls. She made all sorts of dolls. All her dolls were nice to her. She was their favorite person. And even when she couldn't find her glasses, Miranda could still make things.

Because what Miranda lacked in sight, she made up for in touch.

Her fingers could tell the difference between a wood screw and a machine screw. She could tell when the wrong wire had been used to repair the power grid. She could take a broken doll one of the orphans threw out and fix it with her eyes closed.  _That's_ how sensitive her fingers were.

When the other kids were teasing her, knowing she could do all sorts of things they couldn't do was the only thing that got Miranda through the day.

* * *

In sixth grade, Miranda Pryce started sitting in the front of the classroom. It was the only way she could read the letters on the chalkboard. 

None of the other kids talked to her, which was just the way she liked it. Miranda would spend lunch time in the classroom fixing equations she wasn't supposed to learn until high school. After school, she fought through headaches brought about by wearing her glasses too long just so she could read about a new exciting field of work.

Space travel.

The teachers didn't want them talking about it because the Russians were responsible, but that didn't stop the students. The other students always talked about _the stars, oh, the stars_ , when talking about space travel, but Miranda couldn't see the stars. The mechanics of space travel drew her like a moth to light. Specifically, the concept of conquering a terrain impossible for humans to live in.

When Miranda read about  _Spunitk I,_ she knew what she wanted to be an engineer when she grew up.

The teachers noticed how smart Miranda was. If she had parents, they would have pulled her parents aside and recommended moving her to eighth grade. Maybe even high school.

But the nuns wanted Miranda to have a, "normal childhood." Or at least the closest thing to normal the orphans could get. So Miranda languished in middle school, looking to the night sky and seeing not stars, but possibilities.

* * *

When Miranda Pryce was sixteen years old, Bobby Calloway asked her to prom. At first she thought he was pulling a prank on her, but he was serious. Bobby wasn't particularly popular, but he wasn't an outcast by any means. So she said might as well.

Miranda's foster sisters found out and for the first time paid actual attention to her. The night of the prom, they completely handled getting her ready. Getting dolled up was an unfamiliar sensation to Miranda... but not an entirely unpleasant one. As her foster sisters curled her hair and did her makeup, Miranda thought maybe there _is_ something to putting on a pretty dress and going out in public. Something so mundane and so _normal_.

Then one of her foster sisters -Trish- came in with a small box. When Miranda asked what was in there, Trish explained they were contact lenses. They would help her see. _Without_ glasses, Trish added like that was the selling point. "Why can't I wear my glasses?" Miranda asked.

Trish meant well. Even when she looked at Miranda like she had two heads and asked why on earth she would want to wear those ugly glasses to  _prom_.

It took them ten tries to get the contacts in. Miranda wanted to give up. But Trish convinced her to stay still, "just one more time!" When Trish held up a mirror, Miranda looked... pretty. _Pretty_. Not a word she used to describe herself. The dress was a hand-me-down, and none of the makeup was hers. But taking away her glasses had transformed Miranda.

She should have realized the transformation was only temporary.

In the middle of prom, Miranda rushed into the girls' bathroom with tears streaming down her face. She thought she could last for the entirety prom, but her eyes hurt too much. She couldn't blink or even look to her sides without sending waves of pain into her eyes. So while the other kids danced and laughed, Miranda was locked in a bathroom stall trying desperately to get the contacts out.

She eventually did, but by then, Bobby was long gone. When she put on her glasses and looked in the mirror, the illusion was shattered completely. All she saw was a girl with smeared makeup trying to be something she wasn't. She hated her.

That night Miranda realized that pretty was never going to be an option for her. Luckily, Miranda realized something else that night.

She didn't need to be pretty. She needed to be smart.

Miranda was going to be the smartest person in the room, and everyone would know that. She was going to walk into a room and have everyone fall silent knowing how smart she was. No one would laugh at her or steal her glasses. They would simply look at her in awestruck fear.

She flushed the contacts and walked home that night.

* * *

In the middle of her sophomore year, Miranda Pryce had to drop out of college.

Not because of her grades. She was excelling in her engineering classes. Being a freshman in 300 and 400 level classes and getting better grades than every upperclassman in the room was intensely gratifying. 

At first, Miranda got by like she always had. She still had her glasses, even if she now had to put her face right next to a page to read the text. But as freshman year went on into sophomore year, hiding her struggle to read from her professors got harder and harder.

Then she couldn't read.

Not just books. She couldn't read  _anything_. 

And it turned out getting through everyday life without being able to read street signs and bus schedules, let alone textbooks and lab reports, made going to school no longer an option.

She'd never forget the day she finally found out what was wrong with her. A rare form of macular degeneration. Brought about by childhood illness and accelerated due to overexertion. Miranda listened to the gray blur of a doctor tell her they could have saved her vision,"if only they'd caught it sooner." If only she hadn't strained her eyes so much in childhood. There was something poetic about that. The one thing that gave Miranda a chance to rise above her pitiful origins also obliterated any chance of rising above her pitiful origins. Despite her begging, even screaming at the doctor, for surgical alternatives, there was nothing they could offer. 

So Miranda dropped out of college. She had no home; the moment she turned eighteen, her foster parents dropped her like a rock. Now she had debt on top of that. And on top of  _that_ she couldn't see.

It wasn't fair. Miranda saw students in her classes, trust-fund, silver spoon students who didn't have to pay their way through college, skipping classes and not taking the material seriously. She was better than all of them, and _she_ was the one being forced to quit.

That resentment never left her. When Miranda got older, it would push her to work harder and better. But the day she left the doctor's office, she sat on a bench and stared paralyzed at the blur of cars passing by, thinking of a future that could never happen and hating the people around her with every second. 

* * *

At age twenty-four, Miranda Pryce met a very important man.

By then, she was completely blind. Somehow she’d found work in an electronics shop. The owner let her stay in an apartment above the shop. Once Miranda got the layout of the building, she navigated her way around by memory. She rarely left the building and only to go to the grocery store two hundred and thirty-seven steps left of the shop. Downstairs during the day, she repaired electronics. Upstairs at night, she worked on her own projects. But she didn't touch anything that involved letters or numbers, unless she was the one writing those letters and numbers.

Miranda could hear the doubt in the customers' voices: a blind repairwoman? How could she fix their broken television? And yes, Miranda couldn't read instruction manuals or work a cash register. But she could feel. She could feel faulty wires and broken parts, and she could distinguish between which parts were required for each job. 

When she returned customers' electronics, fully repaired and functioning better than when they got them, she'd like to picture the looks of surprise on their faces. It was the only way she got through most work days.

But Miranda heard no doubt in this man's voice. He came in with a broken record player. Upon seeing Miranda's clouded over eyes, he asked the usual questions.  _Are you blind? Is that so? How long? How did you come to work in an electronics shop?_

"Would you like to go for a walk, Miss Pryce?"

That was a new one.

"How do you know my name?" Miranda said.

"I know a lot about you," the man said, his voice smooth and confident. "I know you were on track to get your doctorate in engineering and actually do something useful with it. I know your illness prevented you from doing so. And most importantly, I know you're wasting your talents here."

That was the first time anyone had said that to Miranda. 

It was one of those things she'd wanted to hear for a long time but had never realized she needed to hear it. "Who are you? Also  _where_ are you?"

"Oh, how silly of me." Miranda heard movement and felt a hand take hers. A wrinkled hand that didn't match the voice of the man talking to her. "Shall we take that walk now?"

And so they did. And that was the day Miranda Pryce started doing something with her life.

* * *

A year after she quit working in the electronics shop, Miranda made a decision.

Only after exploring every other alternative. Her newfound colleague had _lots_ of alternatives. Most of them not ethically approved by the American Medical Association. But ethically correct science could only do so much for childhood illness. 

No, for Miranda to see again, she would have to resort to more desperate measures.

She could hear the concern in her colleague's voice when he said, "You know what the surgery entails, don't you?"

She knew.

Deep down, she was scared. If her optic nerves didn't take to the new eyes, there would be no way to salvage her old eyes. A year ago, she might not have gone through with the surgery. But now?

"I don't care. I want them out."

Before the surgery, Miranda thought of a story the nuns used to tell. How the eyes were the windows to the soul. When someone died, the light left their eyes, indicating their soul had left their body. Scientifically, the story made no sense. But as Miranda lay down on the operating table and waited for the nurse fill a syringe with anesthetic, she wondered what would happen when she lost her eyes. Would her soul leave her body?

Before she could really consider that question, the anesthetic was already flowing through her veins.

* * *

On the night of April 28, 1973, Miranda Pryce walked out of the hospital and saw the stars for first time. Really saw each individual star in the sky. Miranda had always understood the concept of stars, but... she never fully grasped just how many the human eye could see. And her eyes were better than human eyes. She would have cried if her new eyes had allowed her that luxury. 

The stars were the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen.

And if she lost her soul to get that? So be it.

**Author's Note:**

> I made some changes to this story, nothing too crazy but some changes to help make a smoother timeline. I also changed the title.


End file.
